Today portable electronic devices are ubiquitous. Businesspeople rely on laptop and notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other portable electronic organizers to write memorandums, create letters, edit spreadsheets, databases, and other documents, manage their busy schedules, and store contact information. Mobile and cellular telephones are commonplace, being used by businesspeople to make business calls to clients, customers, and other businesspeople, by family members to remain in contact with each other, and friends to chat amongst themselves. Adults and children alike enjoy music from their portable music players. Additionally, people increasingly use laptop computers, PDAs, and even cellular telephones to access the Internet.
A common feature, or characteristic, that more and more people demand from these portable electronic devices is convenience of size, the smaller the better. People both want and need smaller and smaller devices. People do not enjoy packing and lugging around heavy and bulky electronic devices. Consequently, some of the most popular and most sought after portable electronic devices are those that are feature-rich yet compact. However, as manufacturers reduce the sizes of these electronic devices, they simultaneously reduce the ability for users to interact with the devices. For example, as manufacturers reduce the size of notebook and laptop computers they still must design keyboards that are sufficiently large in order for users with average size hands to be able to type on them.
Manufacturers of portable electronic devices have proposed numerous reduced-size keyboard formats that have been resoundingly rejected by users for various reasons. One example has been the chording keyboard. Chording keyboards have reduced numbers of keys and produce alphanumeric characters by using key combinations. While the chording keyboard technology has great promise in terms of size and speed, people have not migrated to chording because of the steep learning curve and difficult key combinations that must be remembered. Alternatively, some manufacturers produce very small keyboards that produce characters when the users touch tiny keys with a stylus. While these keyboards are small, entering large amounts of text is slow and tedious. Essentially, users are reduced to single-key “hunt-and-peck” typists. Some people may be able to enter text at rates of 10 to 20 words per minute using these keyboards. However, people that have conventional typing skills are used to entering text at rates between 50 to 120 words per minute find these keyboards too tedious and time consuming.
Another keyboard manufacturers have tried is the chiclet, or rubber-keyed, keyboard. Manufacturers like rubber-keyed keyboards because they are relatively inexpensive to manufacture. However, portable devices today that employ such keyboards typically implement them as tiny keyboards, prohibiting users from striking the keys in a rapid manner. Again, users are relegated to hunt-and-peck, or two-fingered, typing. Users with touch typing skills find these keyboards only slightly better than stylus keyboards.
Another type of keyboard, which happens to be a popular choice among cellular telephone manufacturers, is the T-9 keyboard. Similar to the buttons on a conventional telephone, this keyboard groups multiple letters onto single keys. For example the letters A, B, and C may be on one key, while D, E, and F are on another key. While this keyboard has fewer keys than full-sized QWERTY keyboards, and users generally find entering text relatively easy to learn and easy to do, text input still remains much slower than touch typing with a full-sized QWERTY keyboard. One reason for this is that users generally must strike a key 2 to 3 times to select the desired character. Some manufacturers improve the speed of using T-9 keyboards by utilizing computer algorithms that predict the words users are entering. While such algorithms have dramatically increased the rate of entering text with T-9 keyboards, the algorithms nonetheless fall short of the speed attainable by users employing touch typing with conventional full-sized keyboards.
Given the keyboard apparatuses and devices currently available for entering alphanumeric text into electronic devices, users need alternative keyboards that are more compact yet still enable them to use their touch typing skills. Such keyboard apparatuses and devices should allow rapid input of information, where several fingers can press keys in rapid succession to quickly enter large amounts of data. This invention addresses these issues.